Deep thoughts :)

I have been thinking lately about how to quantify what differentiates my company and offering from competitors like ADP and zenefits.

There are the obvious answers, we have a complete, integrated, single-database, single-system, end to end solution. We have, according to our clients, the best personable customer service. We have, in my view, the best software application in the industry. This is all good, but not enough. I mean I hope everybody in our industry strives to have great customer service and continues to update and innovate on the software front. I would consider that a minimum baseline and not a distinguishing feature, not a company identity.

I am an AWS fanboy, a member of the Amazon Partner Network, certified AWS architect, certified AWS developer and most importantly run a multi-million business on AWS. I try to keep up with everything new from AWS, attend every re:Invent and try out most new things while they are still in preview. None the less, all those cool podcasts from Scott Hanselman about easy deployments to the Azure Platform as a Service piqued my curiosity.
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Growing up a nerd in the Middle East I was fond of two things: Soccer and Reading. As a pre-teen I read all the time, I had a book in my hand in the car, walking home from school, in bed, eating dinner, in class — hidden inside my textbooks —, and on the soccer field; so i can read a little bit while the ball was on the other side of the field.
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The 2014R7 release of our flagship software has been released last night. As our users know, we release in place, with no down time and no interruptions. There has been nearly 50 items in this release, those impacting the end user are detailed in the release notes. We will have a separate blog post describing some of the functional changes in this release but I wanted to touch on some of the technical changes today.
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Our StratEx family is spread out over half a dozen offices in six states. As such, we do not always get to see each other. Thus we make it a tradition that once a year everybody in the StratEx family gets together at our flagship office on beautiful Michigan Avenue for our annual Holiday Party. The office sits on the 28th floor in a skyscraper in the middle of Michigan Avenue.
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The recent news of trouble in node land is unsettling. Nodejs is am amazing technology with a big following. Companies such as Linked-In bought into it from the early beginning. Microsoft is making it a first class citizen in the Visual Studio eco system. AWS just launched a new service based on node, and has a great sdk for it. Joyent has embraced it from the get go and is now the corporate sponsor.
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